Statelessness in the Caribbean
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Without citizenship from any country, more than 10 million people worldwide are unable to enjoy the rights, freedoms, and protections that citizens of a state take for granted. They are stateless and formally belong nowhere. The stateless typically face insurmountable obstacles in their ability to be self-determining agents and are vulnerable to a variety of harms, including neglect and exploitation. Through an analysis of statelessness in the Caribbean, Kristy A. Belton argues for the reconceptualization of statelessness as a form of forced displacement. Belton argues that the stateless—those who are displaced in place—suffer similarly to those who are forcibly displaced, but unlike the latter, they are born and reside within the country that denies or deprives them of citizenship. She explains how the peculiar form of displacement experienced by the stateless often occurs under nonconflict and noncrisis conditions and within democratic regimes, all of which serve to make such people's plight less visible and consequently heightens their vulnerability. Statelessness in the Caribbean addresses a number of current issues including belonging, migration and forced displacement, the treatment and inclusion of the ethnic and racial «other,» the application of international human rights law and doctrine to local contexts, and the ability of individuals to be self-determining agents who create the conditions of their own making. Belton concludes that statelessness needs to be addressed as a matter of global distributive justice. Citizenship is not only a necessary good for an individual in a world carved into states but is also a human right and a status that should not be determined by states alone. In order to resolve their predicament, the stateless must have the right to choose to belong to the communities of their birth.
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Statelessness in the Caribbean
Bert B. Lockwood, Series Editor
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Reconceptualizing statelessness as a form of forced displacement in situ is important for several reasons. First, statelessness is a human rights issue that most people do not know exists. As UNHCR admitted, it is “one of the most neglected areas of the global human rights agenda” (UNHCR 2011b, 2). While the plight of refugees, IDPs, and other forced migrants has garnered the attention of the international, humanitarian, policy-making, and scholarly communities over the decades, statelessness has not. It is only in the past three years that the first Global Forum on Statelessness34 was held and that UNHCR launched its global #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness, even though statelessness has existed since before the organization’s inception and is one of its primary mandates. It is also only in the past few years that scholarly interest in the subject has begun to develop and that regional intergovernmental organizations, such as the OAS and the European Union (EU),35 have begun to address the issue.
The lack of attention given to statelessness is problematic because stateless people, as I describe in Chapters 2 and 5, are susceptible to a range of human rights violations as noncitizens everywhere. As UN Secretary General (UNSG) António Guterres declares, “The daily suffering of millions of stateless people is an affront to humanity” (cited in van Waas 2013, n. pag.). Yet because their situation typically lacks the humanitarian or emergency nature of other types of forced displacement—they may live in democracies and face little to no persecution; they may have never had to leave their home due to conflict or crisis; they may outwardly appear like any citizen you meet—their particular plight has often gone unrecognized or been made secondary to other human rights concerns. But, as I explain later in the text, statelessness is an insidious form of displacement, with invidious effects. Reconceptualizing statelessness as forced displacement in situ thus demands that we consider statelessness as important to address as other types of forced displacement.
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